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Beware HP notebook wifi

BOFFINS at the University of Rochester have come up with a wireless chip design which uses a tenth of the battery power of current designs.

That's from a Register story here.
But if you own a HP/Compaq, you can forget about upgrading to such a card when it becomes available, unless you pay HP's price and buy it from them. While Intel recently announced an intent to sponsor more interchangablilty and standardization of notebook components, HP has been working to make already existing standards less interchangable.
HP/compaq notebooks contain bios code to prevent us from using a standard mini-PCI slot wireless card, unless that card comes from HP with HP firmware code.

My Compaq X1000 has not had its bios updated, so it will boot okay with the new Intel 2200 "g" card installed, but the card is not powered up. I'll have to do further research on that issue. However, those who have updated their bios past v.34 get an error msg at boot that halts the boot process, until they remove the "offending" card.
Presumably this is also the case with all the new HP and Compaq notebooks.
I had moved my X1000's original 2100 "b" card to the Toshiba I sometimes carry to work. For now, I may need to put the "b" card back and the new "g" card in the Toshiba.